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Nutanix CE Now Available on Ravello!

Two companies that have been doing some pretty cool things on their own have now joined up to offer something very awesome. As of November 17th, Ravello will now be offering a preconfigured Nutanix Blueprint for use with their HVX nested hypervisor offering.

Things to know:

The blueprint being offered is the Community Edition (CE) and has all the existing limitations therein. More information can be found on: Nutanix’s site

A Nutanix NEXT account will be required to use the appliance on Ravello. Sign up is quick and easy, my account took under 5 minutes to create and gain CE access. You can create a NEXT account on: Nutanix’s site

A Nutanix NEXT account requires a “business email”, ie. non-gmail/live/hotmail/etc

The appliance asks for 4 CPUs and 16GB RAM. In my account, it was estimated at roughly $1.13/hour to run out of Amazon’s cloud.

If you happen to be a vExpert with a Ravello account, you may have noticed there’s an 8GB/VM limit. With this release, that limit has been bumped to 16GB… on all VMs!

You may be asking “why is this a big deal?” at this point. Nutanix has offered their CE offering for a fair amount of time and the minimum requirements are pretty relaxed, right? While both are true, it’s never been this simple. You don’t need any hardware at all, just a Ravello & Nutanix NEXT account and 15 to 20 minutes and you have an operational single node cluster available whenever you need it for whatever reason you need it.

Let’s walk through getting started:
First, log in to your Ravello account and select the Ravello Repo in the top right-hand corner. There will then be a new window where searching for “Nutanix” will bring up the “Nutanix Community Edition” Blueprint which can be added to your Library by simply clicking “Add to Library”.

Once complete, head to the “Applications” area and select “Create Application”.
Give the new application a meaningful name, check mark the “From Blueprint” option, select the “Nutanix CE…” Blueprint, and select “Create”.

When the application creation completes, you’ll be brought to the “Canvas” page for that application. Let’s take a second to review the specs on the newly created VM:

When reviewing the VM is complete, as I wouldn’t recommend changing anything at this point, click on the publish button to push the system out to the desired cloud and get it started. Note: it’s configured to auto-start, so don’t walk away. It doesn’t take long at all to deploy and it just unnecessarily uses resources as you’re paying for it’s use or, as a vExpert only given a specific allotment.

Once it’s deployed, how do you get to it? Click on the Nutanix VM again and off to the bottom right-hand side you’ll notice the status for the VM. Within that box, look in the “External access for” box for the NIC which lists in the “Ports” area “9440 (https)”. The DNS name and IP is where the PRISM management interface can be loaded. Example:

An item to note if you’re new to Ravello, the IPs persistent only while that Application is running. Once the Application is shutdown, the IPs are recycled quite quickly. However, the DNS names are persistent and are easily copied out of the VM Status area. I used the IP in these screenshots for simplicity and to hide the public name of my instance.

Logging in is simple, username and password are both “admin”. It will prompt for the user to then change the password. Once that’s complete, it will ask you to login via the user’s NEXT credentials. Once authenticated through, you’re all done! Here’s a peek at what it looked like for me:

Definitely want to say thanks to both Ravello and Nutanix for making this happen, and also another thanks for offering a special briefing and early access to the vExperts!